Monday, January 30, 2012

It hasn't been completely unbearable

As we make our goodbyes, our New York friends have been asking us if we've enjoyed our time here. With puppy dog sad eyes, they say things like 'we get the impression you might not really love New York'. And then we feel bad.

Because we're always harping on about how great Malibu was, and how excited we are about settling in London. Poor New York seems to be no more than an inconvenient stepping stone. And we moan about our rent and the size of the apartment and the smart Manhattanites nod sagely as if to say 'if you're still moaning about that, you haven't really 'got it' yet...'

So allow me to set the record straight. New York, we like you. We like you a lot.

We like your excellent coffee shops and bars. We love our neighbourhood, the High Line, and all our favourite local restaurants. TLOML really likes all the good pizza slice places. I really like running along the Hudson riverside. We love Tribeca, especially when combined with afternoon drinking. We like always being able to pay with a card in a cab, and I like those little TV screens in the cabs too (TLOML not so much...). We like a lot of buildings, especially in Chelsea. So many that the phrase 'I like that building' is spoken almost as often as 'Want to grab a slice?'

We like this building

We like walking everywhere. Especially walking home from dinner in the West Village, feeling smug about our neighbourhood. And wandering down Fifth or Madison late at night after an Upper East Side dinner, and looking in all the shop windows. TLOML likes the quality of the steak houses. We both love the bagel options near us. And the diversity of people who live here (especially after LA, where the population of blondes-chasing-dreams is just a little too dominant). We like those bright blue clear skies you get so many of (though we don't love the sweltering humidity or icy cold that accompanies them so often).

And most of all, we like the people. Specifically, those dear New Yorker friends who we have loved being able to hang out with so much in the past 10 months. Now it's back to email and Facebook contact, at least for most of the time. We will miss them more than anything, I think.

Just because we didn't buy the t-shirt, or sign up for a condo... we really, truly, do like New York.

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Transplanted to Los Angeles and then New York by The Love Of My Life (we’ll call him TLOML) - till I dragged him back to Britain. Writing about the cultural chasm, and our return to LA as a family of 3.